A Decade of Differences

When I think back over the past 10 years that GlobeSt.com has been following the fortunes of the commercial real estate industry, I think about not only real estate itself but subjects that, though at least one step removed from the industry, still had bearing on it. About the time we were building a head of steam and getting ready to launch GlobeSt.com, there were the concerns about Y2K and what disasters might befall computers around the world―including those that keep all of the financial records that are so important to real estate. Y2K came and went smoothly, and there is no truth to the speculation that we waited until after January 1, 2000 to launch GlobeSt.com to make sure our computers would be working.

But Y2K did bring another concern: the Dot-Com bubble, which had a more direct bearing on real estate. New internet companies were starting up all over the place, not just in Silicon Valley here in California, and they were buying and leasing loads of space. Often, they were taking on much more space than needed, anticipating huge growth, so they helped to drive up rents and sales prices. The real estate industry prospered from this Dot-Com growth for a while, but it had to adjust drastically when the bubble burst. Nonetheless, commercial real estate recovered and went on to prosper along with the rest of the economy until the downturn late in the decade.